required for 1.0 release

On windows, the extension crashs on some systems

reported by FS on 2009-04-09

On some Windows systems, if you install and use the extension, it will crash OOo.

Severity: required

Reason: The extension ships an own version of libmysql.dll. When Windows loads the driver library (mysqlc.uno.dll), it also implicitly loads the libmysql.dll, which mysqlc.uno.dll is linked against. Unfortunately, Windows first searches in the folders specified by your PATH environment variable. If it finds a libmysql.dll in one of those folders, this one is used - no matter whether it is really compatible.

Suggested solutions:

rename libmysql.dll, and link against this renamed version. Argh, not really.

link libmysql.dll statically

load libmysql.dll explicitly (using LoadLibrary). In this case, we would have control over where the lib is taken from

make libmysql a managed assembly, having a identifer, and a version, which changes with every incompatible API/ABI change (and differs between the debug and the release version). In this case, Windows would ignore all libmysql.dll versions found in the PATH which do not proper version.

fieldtype is changed after saving

(Ulf) Duplicate and not an error in C/C++. There is no boolean type in MySQL. However, its handled in the JDBC driver case, the best we can do is emulate it in the same way.

(FS): Really, if there is no BOOL type, I tend to think the driver should not offer it. This way, users are not tempted to use it. Finally, this is a dedicated MySQL driver, it must not necessarily emulate features it does not really have.

(CLU): agree with FS .. every proposed type has to work, any unsupported type must not be shown

TODO (Ulf): analyze reason, and suggest possible solution: "emulate" BOOL like the JDBC driver does (might yield other problems), or drop BOOL from the list of supported types

Currency Value

reported by Mechtilde - needs review

This note relate to 4.2. I can't input currency values. I get there 0.00.

TODO (Chris): check and confirm or deny

getImportedKeys()/getExportedKeys()

reported by Ulf on 2009-01-27 - needs review

Most likely Connector/C++ does not distinguish between "" and NULL parameter values for catalog and schema as requested by the JDBC specs. Do we need the differentiation?

FS: supportsIntegrityEnhancementFacility is used to determine relationship support, but there's meanwhile an exception in the code which enables relationships for MySQL, regardless. (using this method is incorrect, speaking strictly, anyway.)
supportsResultSetConcurrency is not used by default, but its usage can be enabled by the user on a per-database basis. So, it might be better to implement it.

getObject - not sure.

The other three are not used, I think.

TODO (Frank): confirm which ones are needed, actually

End User Observations

This section collects issues as observed by end users

Renaming a view "makes" it a table

reported by Ulf on 09/01/2009

Tested with the JDBC driver. Create a view and rename it in Base. Base changes the icon in the table list and shows the renamed object as a table :-)

clu: works also wrong with native mysql driver -> works fine with odbc driver

Severity: low

Reason: unknown

Removing records from views fails

reported by Ulf on 08/01/2009

Removing records from SQL views neither works with the JDBC driver nor with the native driver. Base sends a misformed query like: "DELETE FROM `test`.`v` W"

Severity: low

Reason: Removing records from views is in general not possible in Base. The fact that "Edit/Delete record" is enabled for a view (as in any table which the user does not have the DELETE privilege for) is a bug, which I fixed in the CWS.

No way to set MySQL specific table attributes

The Base table editor does not give access to table attributes. Not even basic ones such as the Engine (MyISAM: non-transactional, InnoDB: transactional).

Severity: 1.1

Base does not recognize schema changes

After connecting to a database and opening a table once, Base will not recognize changes applied to the DB schema meanwhile when opening the table in the table editor again.

Severity: low

that's not nice, but consistent with other DB/Drivers. For this purpose, there's View/Refresh Tables ...

Table column comments not synced between MySQL and Base

Base table column comments are not synchronized with the MySQL DB and its schema. Existing comments are not displayed in Base, and entering comments in the table editor is not propagated to MySQL.

Severity: later

That's a known issue with all database types. The column description as displayed in Base is purely client-side, and stored within the .odb file only. There's also an issue for this, but I'm too lazy too search for it right now ...

Default values not properly processed

Again, this is a known issue. The default value displayed in the UI is a so-called "control default", which is applied to controls used to enter data into the given field. The DB-side default for a column is a different property, API-wise, and currently not evaluated at all. Probably not even properly fetched by most existing drivers.

Changing this is possible, but probably requires UI changes. First, we would need to define how the control default and the DB default should interact in the UI. A possible scenario would be to drop the UI support for the control default, and always use the DB default (even in controls), as long as the driver supports providing/accepting DB defaults.

BIGINT values crippled

Large BIGINT values are displayed in Base using scientific notation: 1e+15. If one changes the display format to number #.### the first 14 values of a large number (9223372036854775807) are displayed properly but then some rounding takes place, for example: 9223372036854800000. Connector/C++ can handle long long (L64) values properly and Base does use getLong() nevertheless the displayed value seems wrong.

Severity: later

I bet that's because of the number formatter ... processing numbers for display is done using a office-wide number formatter component. Unfortunately, it works with double-precision values only, which imposes a precision loss for certain values. This applies to "too-large" values, as well as fractional values with "too many" digits. This is a general problem in Base, and not limited to the MySQL Native Driver.

A possible solution would be to 'not employ the number formatter for certain column types. (Effectively, this means not using a FormattedField for the respective table column in the data view, but a NumericField, which internally works with long integer values of arbitrary (?) length.) This would solve the BIGINT issue, though not the too-many-digits issue for fractional values.

Developer Observations

This section collects observations interesting for developers only. It's likely the describe the root cause for another problem listed in the End User Observations section. In this sense, they might be duplicates, but we currently just use this as reminder list whenever we notice a problem ...